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Al-Qaedas African link

WHILE it would be misguided to ignore the appeal that violent Islamist politics holds for a handful of East Africans, Giles Foden’s Tropic of Al-Qaeda: the African link (News Review, last week) paints an apocalyptic picture that will seem other-worldly to anyone who has studied that region. Like so many who subscribe to the “clash of civilisations”, he makes his case by confusing faith, politics, and race, assuming that the historical spread of Islam can only be explained by aggression and political dominance.

Almost the entirety of his account of the precolonial Zanzibar sultanate, which supposedly planted the region’s deep roots of “hardline Islam”, is false. Contrary to what Foden writes, coastal peoples had practised Islam for many centuries before the sultans established their rule; although the sultans practised the ascetic Ibadhi rite, they never tried to spread it among their largely Sunni subjects. At the sultanate’s height in the